Leveraging AI-Generated Schema Markup for Health Content Optimisation

Massive thanks to Linda Eva Seuna for delving into the intricacies of schema markup in healthcare and how to leverage AI for its implementation.

To ensure your health content stands out and earns more visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs), it's essential to optimise it for both search engines and users. One powerful tool in your SEO arsenal could be schema markup. This article delves into the intricacies of schema markup in healthcare and how to leverage AI for its implementation.

Contents:

• What’s schema markup?
• Why add schema markup to your health content?
• What types of schema should you add to your health content?
• What does a health-related schema markup look like?
• How to generate your schema markup using AI
• Tools for schema markup validation
• How to add your schema markup to your health content
• Best practices for healthcare schema markup implementation

What’s Schema Markup?

Also known as structured data, schema markup is a type of code that is made up of predefined tags (semantic vocabulary) that you can add to your website to help search engines better understand the content of your webpages. 

Once added to your webpage, it helps search engines return more informative and engaging results (rich results) for your users by creating an enhanced description (rich snippet) that appears in search results. This can give you an edge in the competitive world of health SEO.

Appearance in SERP with rich snippets (rates, images, ingredients list, preparation time):

Appearance in SERP without rich snippets with the usual title, URL, and meta description: 

Why Add Schema Markup to Your Health Content?

By providing search engines with clear, structured data about your healthcare content, you can enhance the informative and attractive nature of your pages in relevant search results and rich snippets. This may lead to higher click-through rates (CTRs) and more targeted traffic to your website.

Here are a few examples of how health-related websites have benefited from structured data:

• The Food Network: After converting 80% of their pages to enable search features, they experienced a 35% boost in website visits.
• Nestlé: Pages displayed as rich results in search had an 82% higher click-through rate compared to non-rich result pages.

Overall, the key benefits of adding schema markup to healthcare pages include:

1. Enhanced search result visibility and user experience

Adding schema markup to healthcare pages can significantly improve how they appear in search results and help provide a superior patient experience. 

Medical conditions, treatments, and provider information, for example, display in rich snippets and knowledge panels in a way that is readily accessible and easily understood by patients.

This clarity helps patients make more informed decisions about their healthcare options and reduces friction in the patient journey from initial search to getting the critical information they need.

2. Improved local healthcare presence and discovery 

Schema markup strengthens your local search presence by clearly structuring information about facility locations, departments, and specialties. 

This is particularly valuable for hospitals and clinics seeking to attract nearby patients, as it helps them appear more prominently in location-based searches and map results with accurate, detailed information about their facilities and services.

The markup ensures that vital details like operating hours, emergency services, parking information, and facility amenities are prominently displayed, making it simpler for patients to access the care they need.

3. Increased trust and authority for EEAT signals

Schema markup also helps you establish trust and demonstrate the authority of your healthcare providers by properly structuring and highlighting important details that build credibility and reliability.

When elements such as medical expertise, board certifications, professional affiliations, or patient reviews are marked up correctly, search engines can confidently display these (Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trust) EEAT quality signals to potential patients in SERPs. 

4. Enhanced content organisation and accuracy 

You can benefit from improved content organisation and accuracy through schema markup implementation. Medical procedures, conditions, treatments, and services can be systematically categorised and linked, creating a clear hierarchy of information. 

This structured approach ensures consistent presentation of medical terminology, accurate representation of healthcare services, and proper contextualisation of complex medical information, ultimately leading to better understanding by both search engines and your target audience.

What Types of Schema Should You Add to Your Health Content?

To choose the appropriate schema for your webpages, consider the type of content you're dealing with and the information you want to highlight. Several key health and medical schema types are particularly important such as:

Schema Type	Type of Content
“Physician”	For individual doctor profiles
“MedicalOrganisation”	The base for most healthcare organisations
“Hospital”	Specific to hospitals, with properties for beds, departments, etc
“MedicalClinic”	For clinics, doctor's offices, and similar facilities
“Drug”	For information on medications, including side effects and dosage
“MedicalProcedure”	For pages about medical treatments and procedures
“MedicalTherapy”	For non-drug treatments, like physical therapy or counseling
“MedicalGuideline”	For clinical practice guidelines and recommendations
“MedicalScholarlyArticle”	For research papers and medical publications
“MedicalCondition”	Essential for pages about diseases, illnesses, etc
“MedicalWebPage”	A general type for health-related pages not fitting other categories

Schema.org is an essential documentation resource for any website, including healthcare ones, aiming to enhance their search visibility through structured data markup.

What Does a Health-Related Schema Markup Look Like?

How does structured data transform a simple webpage into a highly optimised digital asset? To explore this, let's closely examine a live example from hub.health Australia's weight loss treatment page, which incorporates the "MedicalCondition" and "MedicalWebPage" schemas. 

To examine the schema markup that is integrated into the HTML code of any webpage, you can use Google Chrome's built-in capabilities. Simply right-click anywhere on the webpage while using the Chrome browser, and select "View Page Source" from the context menu. This action will open a new tab displaying the raw HTML code of the page. 

Let’s begin with the foundational elements.

The “@context” and “@type” declaration

All schema markups begin with "@context": "https://schema.org", indicating the use of the Schema.org vocabulary. 

The primary "@type": "MedicalWebPage" tells search engines that the page isn’t just any webpage; it's specifically a medical-focused page containing health-related information. 

This distinction helps search engines accurately understand and categorise the content in the correct medical context.

The “mainEntity” structure

The “mainEntity” section provides the primary content’s detail and contains four key properties:

• "@type": "MedicalCondition" establishes the content category
• "name": "Weight Loss" defines the focus of the content category.
• "description": An overview of available treatments
• "url": The canonical URL for this content

The description field particularly demonstrates comprehensiveness by mentioning various treatment modalities, creating a clear scope of the content.

Author attribution and branding

Moving to the "author" section, we see a nested structure that builds credibility. 

The “Organization” schema type includes not just basic identifiers like name and URL, but also incorporates a nested "ImageObject" for the logo. This establishes content attribution and organizational credibility markers which are elements of medical information trust.

Temporal context

The schema includes two important time-related fields in the ISO 8601 format (YYYY-MM-DD):

• “datePublished”: When the content first went live
• “dateModified”: When it was last updated

This temporal information helps search engines understand the freshness and maintenance of medical content, which is particularly important in healthcare where outdated information could become life-threatening.

The “MedicalEntity” specification

The about section uses "@type": "MedicalEntity" to further contextualise the content. The inclusion of “alternateName” helps search engines understand alternative terms for the same medical concept - in this case, "Weight Management" as an alternative to "Weight Loss Treatment". This boosts comprehensive indexing across various search terms.

Related content network

The “relatedLink” array creates a content network by connecting this page to related internal treatment pages. This structure includes three distinct URLs pointing to specific treatment types:

• Weight loss injections
• Weight loss tablets
• Weight loss shakes

This interconnected structure helps search engines understand the breadth of available treatment options and their relationships.

The “potentialAction” section

The “potentialAction” section, using "@type": "ReadAction", defines the primary intended user interaction with this content. It's structured with an “EntryPoint” that specifies where users can access the full information. This helps search engines understand the primary purpose of the page and how users can engage with it.

The overall nesting structure follows a logical four-level hierarchy:

• Level 1: The fundamental declarations (context and page type)
• Level 2: Major content sections (mainEntity, author, etc.)
• Level 3: Detailed information within those sections
• Level 4: The deepest level of specific details (like logo information)

This hierarchical structure isn't just about organisation—it's about creating clear relationships between different pieces of information. Think of it like a medical textbook where each chapter (Level 2) contains sections (Level 3) that might have specific illustrations or detailed explanations (Level 4).

The entire schema structure works as an interconnected system where each component supports and enhances the others. The nested objects provide detailed context, while arrays create content relationships and alternative access points. This comprehensive approach helps search engines understand not just the content itself, but its place within the broader medical information landscape.

Here is a table listing common types of healthcare pages along with markup types and entities you could add or nest with each other to create a structured data ecosystem for your health site:

Healthcare Page Type	Examples of Markup Types & Entities to Consider For Nestling
Provider Profile Pages	Physician, MedicalBusiness, MedicalSpecialty, MedicalClinic, MedicalInsurancePlan, PostalAddress, ContactPoint, MedicalAudience, EducationalOccupationalProgram, Rating, Review
Location Pages	Hospital, MedicalClinic, MedicalBusiness, EmergencyService, PostalAddress, ContactPoint, GeoCoordinates, HealthAndBeautyBusiness, MapLocation
Condition/Treatment Pages	MedicalCondition, MedicalSignOrSymptom, MedicalTest, MedicalTherapy, MedicalProcedure, Drug, MedicalSpecialty, MedicalRiskFactor, MedicalCode, ReviewedHealthCondition, Claim, ClaimReview, PreventionIndicator, RiskFactor, MedicalAudience, MedicalGuideline
Service Line Pages	MedicalSpecialty, MedicalProcedure, MedicalCondition, Physician, BlogPosting, Article, EducationalOccupationalProgram, MedicalWebPage, HealthTopicContent
Patient Resources/Blog	BlogPosting, Article, HealthTopicContent, ItemList, Course, EventListing, MedicalScholarlyArticle, MedicalWebPage, Recipe, HowTo, Video
General Healthcare Pages	HealthAndBeautyBusiness, ActionableMedicalHelpLine, ChatAction, ContactPoint, PostalAddress, GeoCoordinates, MedicalWebPage, FAQPage, QAPage, RealEstateListing
Patient Testimonials/Reviews	Review, Rating, UserReview, Testimonial, AggregateRating
Insurance Information	MedicalInsurancePlan, PaymentAccepted, InsuranceAgency, WebPageElement, FinancialProduct
Clinical Trial Pages	MedicalTrial, StudySample, MedicalTrialDesign, MedicalTrialRegion, MedicalTrialSponsorship, MedicalWebPage, ResearchProject
Health & Wellness Classes/Events	EventListing, Course, HealthTopicContent, Recipe, ExerciseAction, DietarySupplement, WebPageElement, HowTo, Video
Virtual Care/Telemedicine	VirtualLocation, MedicalService, MedicalProcedure, ContactPoint, ChatAction, MedicineSystem, EventReservation, VideoObject
Medical Forms	MedicalForm, MedicalCondition, MedicalStudy, MedicineSystem, MedicalProcedure, WebPageElement, FormAction
Staff Recruitment Pages	JobPosting, EmploymentAgency, EducationalOccupationalProgram, WebPageElement

How to Generate Your Schema Markup Using AI

Gone are the days of wrestling with manually writing complex schema code. Today's AI tools simplify this task into a process anyone can master. Let’s explore how you can use AI to easily generate search-engine-friendly schema markup.

Step 1: Identify relevant schema types

As mentioned, schema.org offers a wide range of schema types specifically designed for healthcare entities. Carefully identify the schema types that best represent the content on your healthcare web pages. Start by implementing schema on these high-priority pages. 

Step 2: Choose a format for your schema markup

According to Schema.org's beginner's guide to structured data, major search engines like Google mainly support structured data in the following formats:

• JSON-LD: This is the recommended format by Google and is generally considered the easiest to implement. It involves adding a JavaScript code snippet to the <head> or <body> section of your web page.
• Microdata: This format involves adding schema markup directly within the HTML code of your web page using attributes like itemscope, itemtype, and itemprop.
• RDFa: This is another format that embeds schema markup within the HTML code using attributes like vocab, typeof, and property.

Step 3: Generate your schema markup

Several tools can help you generate your schema markup code, including Google's structured data markup helper or various third-party generators that create schema code based on user input. Today, however, our focus will be on how to leverage AI (Claude.ai in this case) to generate your structured data.

First, let's cover how to structure your prompt to Claude. Here's an effective template:

“Please help me create JSON-LD schema markup for [specific healthcare content type]. 

Here are the key details: 

• Page type: [e.g., Medical Organization, Medical Procedure, Doctor Profile] 

• Page URL: [your URL] 

• Key information: [list relevant details like name, address, specialties, etc.] 

Please generate complete JSON-LD code that follows Schema.org standards.”

Example: 

"Please help me create JSON-LD schema markup for a physician's profile page. 

Here are the key details:

• Page type: Physician

• Page URL:https://www.mayoclinic.org/doctors/smith-john-md/12345

• Key information:

Doctor name: Dr. John Smith

Phone: +15075550123

Practice address: 200 First St. SW, Rochester, MN 55905, US 

Please generate complete JSON-LD code that follows Schema.org standards."

Claude would then respond with properly formatted JSON-LD schema markup like this:

Note that sometimes AI gets it right immediately, while other times you might need to tweak a detail or two. Don’t blindly trust AI’s output without validation! 

Other resources to help you leverage ChatGPT for schema markup generation include:

• Add Actions - Schema Writer
• SEO Schema Generator

Tools for Schema Markup Validation

Once you have generated your schema markup for your website, the next step is to validate it to ensure it functions correctly. Several tools are available to assist this process. Understanding their strengths can help you decide which one aligns best with your objectives.

1. Schema Markup Validator

The Schema Markup Validator serves as one of the most thorough tools for validating against the complete schema.org vocabulary. It's platform-agnostic and particularly useful for the implementation of new schema types, though it doesn't provide rich result previews or search engine-specific guidance.

How to use it:

• Go to the Schema Markup Validator.
• Enter a URL or paste your code snippet.
• Run the test.
• Review any errors or warnings. You can return to your AI and ask for help to fix your errors.
• Re-test.

Results: Our AI-generated schema code snippet was validated without errors or warnings.

2. Sitebulb

Sitebulb stands out as one of the most comprehensive paid website auditing tools that includes a dedicated in-built structured data checker. It validates your schema against both schema.org and Google's general structured data guidelines. 

Its unique strength lies in its ability to perform individual as well as bulk schema analysis with advanced filtering, visualization, and reporting features, making it ideal for large-scale technical SEO audits. 

How to use it (for single URL or code snippet analysis):

• Find the Schema Data Testing Tool within Sitebulb's interface and start a “New Test”.
• Enter the specific URL of the page you want to validate or the code snippet.
• Click the "Run Test" button to initiate the analysis.
• The tool will identify any errors or warnings in your schema markup implementation.
• Based on the feedback, correct any errors.

Find out: How to carry out a [bulk or large-scale] structured data audit with Sitebulb

3. Google's Rich Results Test

Google's Rich Results Test excels at providing immediate, accurate previews of how structured data will appear in Google Search results. While it's limited to Google-supported schema types, it's one of the most reliable tools for ensuring your markup will generate the desired rich results in Google's search listings and offers real-time validation.

How to use it:

• Go to the Rich Results Test tool.
• Enter a URL or paste your code directly.
• Run the test.
• Review any errors or warnings. Address them and re-test.

Note: Google does not guarantee that your structured data will appear in search results, even if your page is correctly marked up according to the Rich Results Test. There are several reasons why this might happen and strategies to optimise for different types of featured snippets.

4. Google Search Console

Google Search Console differentiates itself by providing real-world performance data and ongoing monitoring of structured data implementation. Unlike other tools, it offers historical tracking and automated alerts for issues, making it invaluable for long-term schema maintenance and optimisation.

How to use it:

• Go to the "Enhancements" section in your Google Search Console account.
• Select the specific report for the type of schema you've implemented (e.g., "Products," "Breadcrumbs").
• Review any errors or warnings. Fix them on your site.
• You can also use the GSC "URL inspection" tool to test individual pages.

Each tool has its strengths and weaknesses, but using a combination of them provides a more complete picture of your schema's health. Include schema validation in your regular SEO maintenance for optimal performance.

How to Add Schema Markup to Your Health Content

Once you have generated the schema markup code, you might consider:

• Adding it manually: Place the schema markup within the <head> or <body> section of your HTML page. This ensures that search engines can easily access and process the information.

• Using a plugin or extension: If you're using a content management system (CMS) like WordPress, you can use plugins or extensions to simplify the process of adding schema markup, without directly editing the code.

To inspire your future schema automation goals, you might want to learn how Sitebulb automated schema implementation on their website. 

Common Best Practices for Healthcare Schema Markup Implementation

To make the most of schema markup for your health content, keep these best practices in mind:

Be accurate and specific

Ensuring absolute accuracy and specificity in your markup for healthcare means your schema should reflect the page's visible content, using standardised medical terminology and codes. For example, when marking up Type 2 Diabetes, include specific ICD-10 codes, clear symptom descriptions, and structured treatment information.

Keep your markup up-to-date

Health information evolves rapidly, so your schema must keep up too. Establish a regular review cycle for your health content schema to update your markup with changing treatment guidelines or new research. Document medical review dates, update research citations, and revise treatment-related markup to reflect current best practices.

Monitor your results

Once you've gone through the efforts of implementing your schema markup, remember it isn't a set-it-and-forget-it deal. You'll want to keep a close eye on several key metrics: search rankings, click-through rates (CTR), and organic traffic. They can give you a good picture of how your efforts are paying off. Be ready to tweak and refine your strategy as needed.

Wrap up!

Schema markup implementation represents a significant step forward in healthcare content optimisation. Though it might seem initially daunting, AI tools paired with proper validation and ongoing maintenance can simplify the process. The numerous benefits make it a worthwhile investment for any healthcare organisation.

You might also like:

• 5 Steps to Enhance E-E-A-T for Better SEO Rankings
• Complete Guide to Entity SEO
• How to Optimise for Different Types of Featured Snippets